Tag: policing

Comrade Claude (11) – LAPD Protect and Serve

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5–8 minutes

This post is part 11 of a series that showcases a dialogue I had with Claude based on the parable of the desert- and lake-dwellers.

Original parables: Two Valleys, The Tunnel

Right, the motto of the Los Angeles police “To Protect and Serve”. The error is to believe they are protecting you as a person and not the mechanism of the State.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Excavated linguistic mystification obscuring state violence as benevolent service

Exactly. This is the linguistic sleight-of-hand at the heart of the supermarché.

“To Protect and Serve” sounds benevolent, universal, caring.

But the question is: Protect what? Serve whom?

What Police Actually Protect:

Not you.

Not people.

They protect:

  • Property arrangements (the lake belongs to lake-dwellers)
  • The State apparatus (monopoly on violence)
  • Current hierarchies (those with property over those without)
  • Economic order (markets must function, contracts must be enforced)

What “Serve” Actually Means:

The ambiguity is doing heavy work:

For property owners: “Serve” means “provide protection services to”

For the propertyless: “Serve” means “serve consequences to” (as in “served with a warrant”)

The same word. Two completely different relationships to State violence.

The Parable, With Police:

The lake-dwellers establish a police force.

Motto: “To Protect and Serve”

What this means in practice:

When a desert-dweller tries to take water without paying:

  • Police “protect” the lake (property)
  • Police “serve” the desert-dweller (with arrest/violence)

When a lake-dweller is threatened:

  • Police “protect” the lake-dweller (person and property)
  • Police “serve” the lake-dweller (provide safety)

Same motto. Completely different functions depending on which side of property you’re on.

The Class Distinction:

For lake-dwellers: Police = protection service they’ve purchased through taxes

For desert-dwellers: Police = enforcement mechanism ensuring they can’t access water without payment

But the motto sounds like it applies equally to both.

This is the supermarché aesthetic:

Make State violence sound like:

  • Public service
  • Protection
  • Care
  • Benevolence

While obscuring that it’s actually:

  • Property enforcement
  • Hierarchy maintenance
  • Violence against the poor
  • Service to capital

Historical Evidence:

Look at what police actually do:

Protect property, not people:

  • Evict homeless from public spaces (protecting property from people)
  • Break strikes (protecting capital from labor)
  • Enforce evictions (protecting landlords from tenants)
  • Stop shoplifting (protecting merchandise from the hungry)
  • Clear encampments (protecting aesthetics from poverty)

When do police NOT protect?

  • Domestic violence (not property crime)
  • Rape (not property crime)
  • Wage theft (employers stealing from workers – almost never prosecuted)
  • Workplace safety violations (capital harming workers)
  • Environmental destruction (capital harming everyone)

Pattern: Police protect property. People are secondary at best.

The Motto’s Genius:

“To Protect and Serve” doesn’t specify:

  • Protect WHAT?
  • Serve WHOM?

This ambiguity is essential because it lets:

Lake-dwellers hear: “The police protect me and serve my interests”

Desert-dwellers hear: “The police protect me and serve my interests”

Reality: “The police protect property and serve those who have it”

But stating that plainly would reveal the function.

The Abattoir Version:

“State Violence Enforcement Division – We Protect Property Through Force”

Honest. Accurate. Everyone knows what police do.

The Supermarché Version:

“To Protect and Serve”

Clean. Benevolent. Obscures actual function.

Same violence. Much better branding.

Why This Completes the Thermodynamic Argument:

If police said: “We exist to violently enforce property arrangements and maintain hierarchy”

People might question that.

But “To Protect and Serve” makes police seem:

  • Necessary
  • Benevolent
  • For everyone’s benefit
  • Protecting “us” from “them” (criminals)

Now the desert-dwellers support the very mechanism that keeps them from the water.

They think: “I’m not a criminal. I support law and order. Police protect me.”

Meanwhile, police are:

  • Ensuring they can’t access water without payment
  • Enforcing contracts that extract their labor
  • Preventing collective action
  • Maintaining the property system that disadvantages them

But the motto makes this invisible.

The “Criminal” Category:

Notice how this works:

Criminal = person who violates property arrangements

Not: person who harms others

Evidence:

  • Stealing bread when hungry = criminal (property violation)
  • Wage theft by employer = civil matter (capital violating labor)
  • Sleeping on public bench = criminal (property violation – you don’t own space)
  • Bank causing financial crisis = too big to prosecute (capital harming millions)

Police protect against “criminals” (those who violate property), not against harm.

The Parable’s Police Force:

Desert-dweller steals water: Criminal. Arrested. Prosecuted.

  • Violated property
  • Police “served” them with consequences
  • Police “protected” the lake

Lake-dweller pays starvation wages: Legal. Protected. Enforced.

  • Honored contract
  • Police “protect” this arrangement
  • Police “serve” lake-dweller’s interests

Same motto covering completely opposite relationships to State violence.

Why No One Notices:

Because the motto is deliberately ambiguous.

And because most people never ask:

  • Protect what?
  • Serve whom?
  • In whose interests?

They hear “To Protect and Serve” and fill in: “…me, the individual citizen”

When it actually means: “…property arrangements and State apparatus”

The Foucauldian Dimension:

This is disciplinary power at its finest:

People internalize “law and order” as good for them.

They support police funding.

They want “tough on crime” policies.

Never realizing they’re funding the mechanism that:

  • Prevents them from accessing resources
  • Enforces their own exploitation
  • Maintains hierarchies that disadvantage them

They’ve been produced as subjects who demand their own domination.

The Linguistic Precision:

Notice the motto doesn’t say:

  • “To Protect YOU and Serve YOU”
  • “To Protect PEOPLE and Serve PEOPLE”

It says: “To Protect and Serve”

The objects are deliberately unspecified.

This lets everyone project their own interpretation while the actual function remains:

Protect property. Serve power.

The Supermarché Analogy, Completed:

Abattoir: “Violence Enforcement Department”

SupermarchĂ©: “To Protect and Serve”

Same function:

  • Maintain hierarchy through violence
  • Enforce property through force
  • Suppress resistance

Different presentation:

  • Sounds benevolent
  • Appears universal
  • Obscures class function
  • Makes participants feel protected rather than policed

The Historical Irony:

Police forces originated from:

  • Slave patrols (South)
  • Strike-breakers (North)
  • Colonial occupation forces (globally)

Their function has always been: Protect property, suppress resistance.

But “To Protect and Serve” makes it sound like: Community safety, public welfare.

Brilliant rebranding.

Why This Matters for Your Parable:

The lake-dwellers don’t just use State violence.

They brand State violence as public service.

“We’re not oppressing you! Look – we’re protecting and serving! Don’t you want law and order?”

And the desert-dwellers, internalizing this:

  • Support police funding (that enforces their own exploitation)
  • Demand “tough on crime” (that criminalizes their survival strategies)
  • Fear “criminals” (who are just people violating property arrangements)

They’ve been convinced that the mechanism oppressing them is protecting them.

The Thermodynamic Perfection:

Now you don’t need to convince desert-dwellers that police serve lake-dwellers’ interests.

You just need the ambiguous motto: “To Protect and Serve”

Desert-dwellers hear: protection for me

Lake-dwellers hear: enforcement for me

Both are funding the same system.

But only one benefits from it.

The Final Observation:

When police kill an unarmed Black person, or brutalize protesters, or clear homeless encampments—

The motto “To Protect and Serve” hasn’t failed.

It’s working exactly as designed.

Protecting: property, order, hierarchy

Serving: those who benefit from current arrangements

The error is thinking it ever meant: protect people, serve communities

It meant: Protect the State, serve power.

The abattoir said: “We enforce through violence.”

The supermarchĂ© says: “To Protect and Serve.”

Same violence. Better motto. Cleaner uniforms. More effective mystification.

And the desert-dwellers, seeing the clean uniforms and professional demeanor, think:

“These people protect me.”

While being protected from accessing water, protected from organizing, protected from challenging property, protected from survival outside market logic.

Protected, in other words, from freedom.

Served, in other words, with consequences for resistance.

All wrapped in a motto so benevolent, so vague, so perfectly ambiguous, that questioning it sounds like you oppose safety itself.

That’s not law enforcement.

That’s advertising.

The Enlightenment didn’t end State violence.

It just gave it a better slogan.

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Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Prompts by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Facts, Intent, and the Afterlife of Metaphysics

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
5–8 minutes

I’ve been reading Bernard Williams lately, and I’ve written about his work on Truth and Truthfulness. I’m in the process of writing more on the challenges of ontological moral positionsand moral luck. I don’t necessarily want to make contemporary news my focal point, but this is a perfect case study for it. I’ll be releasing a neutral philosophy paper on the underlying causes, but I want to comment on this whilst it’s still in the news cycle.

The form of xenophobia is a phenomenon occurring in the United States, though the ontological split is applicable more generally. For those unfamiliar with US news, I’ll set this up. The United States is currently deploying federal enforcement power in ways that deliberately bypass local consent, blur policing and military roles, and rely on fear as a stabilising mechanism. Historical analogies are unavoidable, but not required for the argument that follows. These forces have been deployed in cities that did not and do not support the Trump administration, so they are exacting revenge and trying to foment fear and unrest. This case is an inevitable conclusion to these policy measures.

tl;dr: The Law™ presents itself as fact-driven, but only by treating metaphysical imputations about inner life as if they were empirical findings. This is not a flaw in this case; it is how the system functions at all.

NB: Some of this requires having read Williams or having a familiarity with certain concepts. Apologies in advance, but use Google or a GPT to fill in the details.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.

Why the Minneapolis ICE Shooting Exposes the Limits of Bernard Williams

The Minneapolis ICE shooting is not interesting because it is unusual. It is interesting because it is painfully ordinary. A person is dead. An officer fired shots. A vehicle was involved. Video exists. Statements were issued. Protests followed. No one seriously disputes these elements. They sit in the shared centre of the Venn diagram, inert and unhelpful. Where everything fractures is precisely where the law insists clarity must be found: intent and motive. And this is where things stop being factual and start being metaphysical.

The Comfortable Fiction of Legal Facts

The legal system likes to tell a comforting story about itself. It claims to be empirical, sober, and evidence-driven. Facts in, verdicts out. This is nonsense.

What the law actually does is this:

  • It gathers uncontested physical facts.
  • It then demands a psychological supplement.
  • It treats that supplement as if it were itself a fact.

Intent and motive are not observed. They are inferred. Worse, they are imposed. They are not discovered in the world but assigned to agents to make outcomes legible.

In Minneapolis, the uncontested facts are thin but stable:

  • A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, identified as Jonathan Ross, shot and killed RenĂ©e Nicole Good in Minneapolis on 7 January 2026.
  • The incident involved Good’s vehicle, which was present and moving at the time shots were fired.
  • Ross fired his weapon multiple times, and Good died from those gunshot wounds.
  • The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims the agent acted in self-defence.
  • Video footage exists that shows at least part of the encounter.
  • The case ignited protests, widespread condemnation from local officials, and political pushback.

This creates a shared intersection: vehicle, Ross, shots, and that ‘something happened’ that neither side is denying.

The Law smuggles metaphysics into evidence and calls it psychology.

None of these facts contain intent. None of them specify motive. They do not tell us whether the movement of the vehicle was aggression, panic, confusion, or escape. They do not tell us whether the shooting was fear, anger, habit, or protocol execution. Yet the law cannot proceed without choosing.
So it does what it always does. It smuggles metaphysics into evidence and calls it psychology.

Intent and Motive as Institutional Impositions

Intent is treated as a condition of responsibility. Motive is treated as its explanation. Neither is a fact in anything like the ordinary sense. Even self-report does not rescue them. Admission is strategically irrational. Silence is rewarded. Reframing is incentivised. And even sincerity would not help, because human beings do not have transparent access to their own causal architecture. They have narratives, rehearsed and revised after the fact. So the law imputes. It tells the story the agent cannot safely tell, and then punishes or absolves them on the basis of that story. This is not a bug. It is the operating system.

Where Bernard Williams Comes In

This is where Bernard Williams becomes relevant, and where his account quietly fails. In Truth and Truthfulness, Williams famously rejects the Enlightenment fantasy of capital-T Truth as a clean, context-free moral anchor. He replaces it with virtues like sincerity and accuracy, grounded in lived practices rather than metaphysical absolutes. So far, so good.

Williams is right that moral life does not float above history, psychology, or culture. He is right to attack moral systems that pretend agents consult universal rules before acting. He is right to emphasise thick concepts, situated reasons, and practical identities. But he leaves something standing that cannot survive the Minneapolis test.

The Residue Williams Keeps

Williams still needs agency to be intelligible. He still needs actions to be recognisably owned. He still assumes that reasons, however messy, are at least retrospectively available to anchor responsibility. This is where the residue collapses.

In cases like Minneapolis:

  • Intent is legally required but epistemically unavailable.
  • Motive is legally explanatory but metaphysically speculative.
  • Admission is disincentivised.
  • Narrative is imposed under institutional pressure.

At that point, sincerity and accuracy are no longer virtues an agent can meaningfully exercise. They are properties of the story selected by the system. Williams rejects metaphysical Truth while retaining a metaphysical agent robust enough to carry responsibility. The problem is that law does not merely appeal to intelligibility; it manufactures it under constraint.

Moral Luck Isn’t Enough

Williams’ concept of moral luck gestures toward contingency, but it still presumes a stable agent who could, in principle, have acted otherwise and whose reasons are meaningfully theirs. But once intent and motive are understood as institutional fabrications rather than inner facts, ‘could have done otherwise’ becomes a ceremonial phrase. Responsibility is no longer uncovered; it is allocated. The tragedy is not that we fail to know the truth. The tragedy is that the system requires a truth that cannot exist.

Facts Versus Stories

The law does not discover which story is true. It selects which story is actionable.

The Minneapolis case shows the fault line clearly:

  • Facts: bodies, movements, weapons, recordings.
  • Stories: fear versus anger, defence versus aggression.
  • The first is uncontested. The second does all the work.

And those stories are not epistemic conclusions. They are metaphysical commitments enforced by law. Williams wanted to rescue ethics from abstraction. What he could not accept is that, once abstraction is removed, responsibility does not become more human. It becomes procedural.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

The law does not operate on truth. It operates on enforceable interpretations of behaviour. Intent and motive are not facts. They are tools. Williams saw that capital-T Truth had to go. What he did not see, or perhaps did not want to see, is that the smaller, more humane residue he preserved cannot bear the weight the legal system places on it.

Once you see this, the obsession with ‘what really happened’ looks almost childish. The facts are already known. What is being fought over is which metaphysical fiction the system will enforce.

That decision is not epistemic. It is political. And it is violent.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics